Many people visualize data as a means to communicate insights about data, but existing interactive visualization tools provide a limited set of design choices for representing data, and as a result the potential to communicate a wide range of insights is reduced. The ability to create a highly customized or bespoke representation of data, one that is tailored to the specificities of the data and the insights that are to be conveyed, increases the likelihood that the message will be received, understood, and remembered by its audience. This expressiveness also gives the communicator a competitive advantage in a landscape awash in conventional charts and graphs.
Most commercial interactive charting tools ask chart authors to choose from a menu of common chart types or templates, such as bar, pie, or line charts, and they provide only superficial customization options beyond the choice of chart type. Beyond interactive charting tools, people also create charts via manual illustration or via programming. Illustration tools, such as Adobe Illustrator, are insufficient for authoring bespoke charts because they lack the ability to map multiple attributes of data to graphic elements. Meanwhile, although, programming a bespoke chart using a library such as D3.js provides chart authors with considerable control over the mapping of data to graphical marks and their layout, such approach can be tedious and is accessible only to a small population, i.e., those having advanced programming knowledge.
Recently, the prospect of creating bespoke charts via interactive authoring, with tools such as Lyra and iVisDesigner has been explored by those skilled in the art. However, these tools maintain a linear data-flow model and predominantly focus on mapping data to marks and glyphs, with little support for specifying the relationship between these elements in terms of layout. By way of example, the design of a simple bar chart is contemplated, where some aspects of the layout are independent of the data, such as a consistent horizontal spacing between bars. In a forward data-flow model, the spacing of bars in a bar chart is specified as a transformation to the position of these marks. To manipulate this and other layout specifications, a programmatic understanding of the internal workings of the tool may be required. Often, such tool specifications are predefined within an illustration tool and is generally open to users on a commercial/retail basis.
Furthermore, current solutions fall short and do not fully address the layout relationship between marks or glyphs and, specifically, whether and how these elements are visually linked such as by drawing edges or bands between them so as to emphasize their connectedness. Akin, to the shortcomings that exist with current graphing solutions, the ability to precisely specify visual links between graphical elements is not readily exposed to users.
A more advantageous approach considers an interactive chart authoring tool that prioritizes the articulation of chart layouts and the visual linking between marks or glyphs resulting in overall enhanced user experiences when creating bespoke charts as well as enhanced computing performance by reducing direct programmatic control of such chart creation tools.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.